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Sooooper Geeeenius.
Sep. 9th, 2012 10:41 pmOne of the persistent geek intellectual fantasies is that of the lone genius showing their fully-formed brainchild to an astonished and adoring public.* Being a geek who has fallen to the allure of this particular myth more than once, I get it. No one wants to look stupid in front of their peers (Humans! We are them!), so there's this urge to downplay works-in-progress to the point of them being completely invisible. In my experience, this is even worse with geeks, because there's this desire to not just show a beautiful final project, but to ensure that all tracks that could even implicate incremental progress/failure are eradicated.
Now, to be sure, there are geniuses, and they do produce masterworks in complete solitude. There just aren't that many of them, and most of the ones you can think of probably didn't do it that way, either.
Mechanically, here's what happens: Someone starts working on a problem. They stumble and fall a lot, but let's say they've been persistent and have an inital prototype working. If it's in the software realm, and they mean to open-source it, they may even have put it on github or Google Code or one of the other similar sites.
Up to this point, precisely no one else knows about their project. Our hero probably is so involved in creating the thing they're creating that they don't even really think of publicity at this point. Heck, even if they do think about publicity, they wouldn't be interested because who would want to see the project in its current state? Minimal documentation, haven't even cleaned up the code yet, and well, the place is just a mess and who would invite company? So, they keep working.
Pretty soon, they have something they'd consider an alpha, maybe a very early beta product. This could be years after they started. So, now they tell people, and since there's an actual there there, people start talking about it more, it (hopefully) gets critical mass, and people start talking about how there's this genius who made this incredible program overnight. Even once multiple people start working on it, the founder/creator will still get credit for starting the phenomenon, which makes them even more of a genius because now they get credit for the whole multi-person project, just by being there at the beginning.**
Put another way, the reason that it looks like people spring full-fledged genius products on the world is because no one is listening before that point. The typical geek brain fills in the "Sole genius working alone in solitude by themselves, without anyone else." narrative. It's awesome, and compelling, and typically wrong.
* There's a thorough debunking of it in the Google I/O talk "The Myth of the Genius Programmer", and I do recommend watching it when you have an hour or so.
** There's an interesting point to be made about American corporate mythology, and how the CEO is typically tagged at the source of ideas and the primary creator, as they represent the direction of the company. More on that later.
Now, to be sure, there are geniuses, and they do produce masterworks in complete solitude. There just aren't that many of them, and most of the ones you can think of probably didn't do it that way, either.
Mechanically, here's what happens: Someone starts working on a problem. They stumble and fall a lot, but let's say they've been persistent and have an inital prototype working. If it's in the software realm, and they mean to open-source it, they may even have put it on github or Google Code or one of the other similar sites.
Up to this point, precisely no one else knows about their project. Our hero probably is so involved in creating the thing they're creating that they don't even really think of publicity at this point. Heck, even if they do think about publicity, they wouldn't be interested because who would want to see the project in its current state? Minimal documentation, haven't even cleaned up the code yet, and well, the place is just a mess and who would invite company? So, they keep working.
Pretty soon, they have something they'd consider an alpha, maybe a very early beta product. This could be years after they started. So, now they tell people, and since there's an actual there there, people start talking about it more, it (hopefully) gets critical mass, and people start talking about how there's this genius who made this incredible program overnight. Even once multiple people start working on it, the founder/creator will still get credit for starting the phenomenon, which makes them even more of a genius because now they get credit for the whole multi-person project, just by being there at the beginning.**
Put another way, the reason that it looks like people spring full-fledged genius products on the world is because no one is listening before that point. The typical geek brain fills in the "Sole genius working alone in solitude by themselves, without anyone else." narrative. It's awesome, and compelling, and typically wrong.
* There's a thorough debunking of it in the Google I/O talk "The Myth of the Genius Programmer", and I do recommend watching it when you have an hour or so.
** There's an interesting point to be made about American corporate mythology, and how the CEO is typically tagged at the source of ideas and the primary creator, as they represent the direction of the company. More on that later.
